This Could have Crashed the Bitcoin Prices so Hard

Bitcoin price is still maintaining stability around $6,700 while managing a substantial daily trading volume at $5.7 billion. However, a bug that has been fixed by the developers already, if the worse then let on by the developer’s inflationary vulnerability has been exploited, could have led the prices to crash.

Bitcoin vulnerability worse than initially revealed

Everything is safe and secure now, however, the newly-patched vulnerability in the Bitcoin Core contained a software bug. The bug that has been fixed with Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 this week, has been far more severe and worse then the developers let on.

No harm is done and since then the Bitcoin Core project has released a full disclosure report as well. But there are some bad and ugly details that could have crashed the market if not patched on time.

To start with, the first part revealed the bug could have been used to shut down the network. But the second part disclosed via Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) report, the vulnerability could have been exploited to create new bitcoins. This would have then resulted in inflating the supply by going above its 21 million hard cap and thus devaluing the price of Bitcoins.

Common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) full disclosure report

The report states,

“In order to encourage rapid upgrades, the decision was made to immediately patch and disclose the less serious Denial of Service vulnerability, concurrently with reaching out to miners, businesses, and other affected systems while delaying publication of the full issue to give times for systems to upgrade.”

It has been explained by the developers:

“In Bitcoin Core 0.15.X, 0.16.0, 0.16.1, and 0.16.2, any attempts to double-spend a transaction output within a single transaction inside of a block where the output being spent was created in the same block, the same assertion failure will occur (as exists in the test case which was included in the 0.16.3 patch). However, if the output being double-spent was created in a previous block, an entry will still remain in the CCoin map with the DIRTY flag set and having been marked as spent, resulting in no such assertion. This could allow a miner to inflate the supply of Bitcoin as they would be then able to claim the value being spent twice.” The good news is the bug hasn’t been exploited and even if the vulnerability wasn’t patched in time, Theymos, Bitcoin subreddit moderator stated, “Even if the bug had been exploited to its full extent, the theoretical damage to stored funds would have been rolled back.”

Also, read: Current Regulatory Framework doesn’t Suit Enterprise Adoption of Cryptos: Veterans Tell SEC

But bulls undefeated

It has been emphasized in the full disclosure report that “it still remains critical that affected users upgrade and apply the latest patches to ensure no possibility of large reorganizations, mining of invalid blocks, or acceptance of invalid transactions occurs.”

If the bug has been exploited this could have crashed the market, not only because of the “inflation vulnerability” but also because of the insatbilit it would have ignited among people but developers acted fast.

Now, the Bitcoin price is still very much in the green and around $6,700. Today’s price range has been between $6,638 and $6,840.

The world’s leading cryptocurrency is managing a substantial daily trading volume at $5.7 billion which is a good sign.

For now, Bitcoin bears seem to be very much into effect, though a majority of the altcoins have started moving into the red. So, it’s yet to be known if bulls will be extended as the experts and investors are predicting and expecting it to.